Could political polarization be addressed by something very simple – getting to know each other better? David Brooks argues that polarization stems from an urgent need for connection. "There are connections between seeing others and strengthening our communities and in turn, democracy," he says.
Brooks is an opinion columnist for the New York Times. He appears regularly on the PBS NewsHour, NPR's All Things Considered, and NBC's Meet the Press. His new book is titled, How to Know a Person, the Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
Guest host: Alison Jones of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University.
Policy 360
How Seeing Each Other Can Combat Polarization
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Conversation Highlights
Responses have been edited for clarity.
Why a book about seeing others in an election year?
I cover politics and if you cover politics, what you run into all day every day is distrust and a sense of isolation, a sense of disconnection, and a sense of bitterness.
And it seemed to me the only way to build trust is to build relationships. And the only way to build relationships is to get really good at knowing how to treat people well. And my hope is that if -- on the ground level -- people treat each other with kindness and respect and consideration, then they'll begin to trust each other more. And if trust goes up, then our society will be healthy on all sorts of domains.
On how we lost connection to each other
There are a lot of reasons. Listeners will be familiar with statistics: the rising depression rates, the rising suicide rates, rising loneliness rates. Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General, talks about the crisis of loneliness.
And it's very unevenly distributed. People with college degrees have a fair number of friends. People with high school degrees have far fewer friends, they're much less likely to be involved in hobby organizations. They're much less likely to go out in public places. So especially among the less educated and less privileged, their social lives are much different than those of us who have college degrees.
And so, I just thought, we all need to learn these skills somehow. It'll make us happier.
On generational differences
One of the things I like about this generation of college students, is they demand more human connection in the workplace than my generation did. For a lot of people [in] my generation, the Boomers, you went to work because it's a job and you didn't want to bring your whole self to work.
But I find the young people I work with, they want to find purpose at work. They want to find a sense of friendship at work, and they want to have a deeper set of connections.
Just to give an example, I founded a nonprofit about eight years ago called Weave, the Social Fabric Project. And I remember the first summer we had 14 interns from various colleges.
And they came up to me one day and they said, "David, we don't think you know us well enough. We'd like to spend the day showing you pictures of our childhood photos."
When I was their age, my mentor was William F. Buckley. I try to imagine going to him when I'm 22 saying, "Bill, I want to spend a day showing you me in diapers." His head would've exploded.
But I did it with the interns. We spent a day looking at their pictures and they told us about their childhoods. I was a little uncomfortable, but it was worth it. We actually did get to know each other a little better. So, if you're a middle-aged person in the workplace and you're not feeling uncomfortable, you're doing it wrong.
On whether society is too polarized to change
I absolutely don't [think we are too polarized]. I think we go through patterns. In the 1770s we were plenty polarized. The vice president shot the former treasury secretary. That's pretty polarized. And you looked at the rhetoric back then, it was worse than today.
In the 1830s: worse than today. The 1860s speak for themselves. 1890s … 1960s … when you go back through history, if you think we're in uniquely bad times, I just think that's a poor reading of history. World War I, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, the Great Depression.
One of the things that has changed [however] is that our media landscape has gotten more negative. Somebody did a Google NGRAM where they look at all the words that are in the newspapers, magazines and books in a given year, and they researched this going all the way back to the 1850s. They looked for positive words and negative words. From 1850 to about 2010, most American public conversation is very positive. [Throughout] all those years, there was more positive talk than negative talk [in the media].
[But] around 2010, it just falls through the floor. And we are now in the most pessimistic, most negative public culture of any time in American history. More negative than the Great Depression, more negative than the Civil War when things were really bad.
And so, I think this is a bit of a media story. We've learned we can generate clicks by generating fear and hate and anger, and partly there's just pessimism feeds on itself.
Advice for students?
I think every generation has a defining challenge, and in my view, the defining challenge of Gen Z is two interrelated things. One is the crisis of connection, the sense of alienation, loneliness, separation, distrust. Conjoined with that is the growing chasm between the educated class and the less educated class.
If you're at Duke, you're like me, involved in the educated class. And so, one of the challenges is to try to build bridges of respect and mutual understanding across this class chasm so we don't become permanently two nations.
David Brooks was on campus to deliver the 2024 Rubenstein Distinguished Lecture. Top image: Onstage Q&A with Duke Trustee Lisa Borders.
Student Perspective
Students Reflect on Meeting David Brooks
While David Brooks was on campus he met with a small group of students. Many are writers for the 9th Street Journal, an online publication from the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy which covers Durham, NC.